How AI Is Helping Lawyers Redesign Legalese - 2025 FT’s Top Legal Innovator Award-Winning Initiative

The Financial Times Top Legal Innovator Award 2025 have once again showcased the people reshaping what it means to practice law. Among the brilliant finalists, spanning compliance, competition, IP, ESG, and AI, one name stood out: Tim Johnson, Partner at Browne Jacobson, and this year’s winner of Most Innovative Legal Practitioner. His achievement? Turning one of the industry’s most impenetrable products, the insurance policy, into plain, human English.

The FT's 2025 edition recognized an initiative that blends AI-driven linguistic analysis, design thinking, and technologies to re-engineer the very language of law. The project, which saw 30 insurers rewrite policies for more than seven million customers, is transforming how legal documents communicate, not just how they’re delivered.

 Legal Accessibility and Empowerment at Scale

Lawyers often aspire to make their work more “accessible.” Few manage to make that promise measurable. Johnson did. Working with the University of Nottingham’s Applied Linguistics Department, he led a research-backed redesign of insurance policy wording, revealing that 80 percent of existing policies were too complex for the average UK reader. The study didn’t just diagnose the problem; it provided a blueprint for change.

Armed with data and technology, Johnson and his team applied AI-driven linguistic analysis to re-engineer policy language, shortening sentences, clarifying intent, and simplifying structure. The result: documents that consumers actually understand, reducing confusion, disputes, and regulatory risk for insurers. Since the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty came into force in 2023, Johnson’s plain-language templates have helped 30 insurers rewrite policies for more than seven million customers.

A Win for Legal Design in a Complex Profession

What makes this recognition significant is not just that a lawyer simplified legal text, it’s how he did it. Johnson’s project embodies the fusion of design thinking and technology, a combination still rare in mainstream legal practice.

This is legal design in action, not as a visual exercise, but as a data-informed methodology for usability. It treats legal documents like products: designed, tested, iterated, and improved based on how real users interact with them.

It’s telling that this approach won against a shortlist that included world-class work in compliance, intellectual property, AI, and ESG law. The judges saw something fundamental here, a reminder that innovation isn’t only about new technologies, but about how we use them to serve people better. As one judge noted,

“Loads of people try to do legal design, but this was interesting, new, and unique.”

That endorsement speaks to a growing recognition: innovation in law must go beyond efficiency to focus on comprehension, usability, and trust. And legal design is the way forward.

The Bigger Shift: From Precision to Usability

Johnson’s work signals a broader movement within the legal sector. For decades, the profession has prized precision, crafting language to be watertight, technical, and defensible. But precision without comprehension creates its own form of risk: frustrated clients, regulatory scrutiny, and declining public trust.

Legal design, especially when combined with linguistics and AI, offers a way out. It reframes legal work not as a set of outputs, but as a service designed for human use. This shift is already visible in progressive law firms and in-house teams embracing usability metrics, is it easy, effective, and efficient? as measures of quality, not compromise.

Anchored in Global Standards

This approach aligns closely with ISO 24495-1:2023, the first international standard for Plain Language, which defines clarity as communication that allows people to find, understand, and use the information they need. Even more recently, the new ISO 24495-2:2025, Plain Legal Language Guidelines extends that principle to law, giving global legal teams a framework to ensure documents are both compliant and comprehensible. 

As legal systems, regulators and clients increasingly demand transparency and usability, the ability to design law that people can actually use will become a defining competitive advantage. The science of clarity is not about making law simpler, it’s about making it functional, accessible, and measurable. With AI, data and design at its core, this transformation marks the beginning of a new era for legal practice: one where clarity is the new compliance, and design is the engine that drives it.

A Lesson for the Profession

Tim Johnson’s win isn’t just a personal achievement; it’s a signal to the industry. That the future of law belongs to those who can integrate empathy with evidence, design with data, and human insight with machine intelligence. By bridging the gap between legal expertise, design methodology, and technology, Johnson demonstrated that innovation in law doesn’t have to be futuristic, it just has to be useful.

And that’s what truly makes this a FT-worthy innovation.